Cold Steel

8

I climbed up the central pillar of the tree toward a smoky abyss studded with lights. Desperation gave me strength and speed. Perhaps the little creatures were at a disadvantage, them being so many and so small and having to coordinate a large limp weight, for I sensed I was gaining on them.

The canopy of leaves faded into smoke, just as it had in my dream. A sleeting wind cut my face, numbing my lips and then my fingers. With my next step, I kicked out over a gulf of air. Nothingness yawned around me as the tree dissolved. Falling, I flailed desperately.

My sandals caught the rim of a ledge. A bucketing motion beneath and around me made me sway as though I had landed on a moving object. Just before I tumbled off, my hand fastened over a metal door latch. I tried to open it, but it was locked.

“Hsst!” a thin voice whispered. “Quiet! Look through my eyes into those of my sibling inside.”

The latch bit me, two pinprick points of pain. Blood slicked the metal. Like a scraping file, its tongue rasped away the moisture.

I shut my eyes. Only then did I realize where I was. A coachman and his coach served the Master of the Wild Hunt. Gremlin spirits inhabited the latches of the coach’s doors, one facing in and one facing out. Four days ago, as time passed in the mortal world, my sire had thrown me out of this very coach. Again I pushed on the latch, but it did not budge.

Yet through the latch, linked by my blood, I saw into the interior of the coach.

With a hand open on Vai’s chest, the Master of the Wild Hunt pressed him against the opposite seat. Andevai’s eyes were open but he seemed paralyzed, both blind and deaf. The gold threads of his red-and-gold dash jacket shimmered under a weirdly glowing light that emanated from my sire. His blue-white mask of ice made my sire seem even more dreadful, for the mask hid his expression and the true color of his eyes.

For all I could tell, my sire had just flung me out a moment ago, as time flowed in the spirit world.

For the longest time—it seemed an eternity and yet maybe I took in only a single shocked breath—he kept himself propped at arm’s length, hand splayed open on Vai’s chest, while he examined Vai in the considering way an experienced cook examines produce to pick what is best out of the basket. He considered Vai’s dark eyes, kissable mouth, very short, trim beard, and shorn-short black hair. His scrutiny had such a disturbingly predatory focus that I opened my mouth to protest, thinking I could be heard through the door. A rough lick from the gremlin’s tongue silenced me. My lips went numb.

As if he had seen enough, my sire sat back. The mask of ice melted into the youthful face he had worn on the ballcourt the night he had taken Vai prisoner after the death of the cacica. His was the kind of face that drew the eye even if you could not warm to it. He had long straight black hair like the Taino, eyes with a slight fold like the Cathayans, a thin Celtic nose, and brown skin rather lighter than Vai’s deep brown Afric complexion. His golden eyes looked so like mine that anyone would know he and I were related.

Vai sucked in a breath. His gaze swept the confines of the coach, flickering as he noted my sire sitting opposite him. He paused to examine the grubby bundle of clothing and food I’d stolen on Salt Island. The shuttered doors and the rest of the interior had no ornamentation except loops to hold on to, a bracket for a lamp, and a filigree of gold-wire decoration around doors and joinings.

As Vai realized I was gone, his hand tightened on the hilt of his sword, which had been forged of cold steel by the secret mage craft known to Four Moons House. I could almost see his thoughts running. I was pretty sure that much of his exceptional power as a cold mage arose from his patience. He analyzed his situation from all angles before he made a decision, just as he spun illusions out of cold magic and worked them over and over until they were seamless.

Vai’s lips pressed into a flat line, and his gaze fell away as if he were looking elsewhere.

The locket I wore at my neck grew warm. Over a year ago a djeli had been paid to weave magic to chain our marriage so I could not escape the mansa’s command to bind the eldest Hassi Barahal daughter to Four Moons House. The djeli, a bard who was also a shaman, had anchored the magical chain in our bodies, so Vai had told me on the night we consummated the marriage. That night we had pledged in whispers things I dared not think of now because to be able to see but not touch or speak to him, to know he was in danger and cut off from me, made my spirit rage.

His faraway pulse caught in my heart. His mouth twitched.

He knew I lived. Maybe he even knew how close I was.

He glanced cautiously at my sire. The contrast between the two men’s clothing could not have been greater. My sire wore a jacket and trousers of unrelieved black, whereas Vai’s clothing was a beacon, meant to be noticed and admired. It was one of his best garments, sewn by a master tailor from a tightly woven silk so smooth it was sensual, cut longer than the current fashion but so well built that the length and trim emphasized its flattering fit.

With gaze lowered respectfully, as a younger man addresses an elder, he spoke polite words in an exceedingly polite voice that I was pretty sure disguised a rich vein of sarcasm.

“Where I come from, a man would call his wife’s father Father. As a courtesy, you understand. To acknowledge the relationship between them. Shall I address you as Father then?”

“She’s dead.”

Contempt flashed in Vai’s expression, his chin coming up to allow him to look down his nose at an inferior being. I had seen that look all too often in the first days of our marriage. It was odd to be glad he had it in him when I had disliked him for it before. “We both know she is not dead. I must suppose you will tell me what you did with her when you think it worth your while to reveal the information to me.”

“I threw her out the door. She’s of no more use to me.”

Vai’s gaze flickered but he had enough self-control not to glance at either of the doors. “Your own daughter? Able to cross between the mortal world and the spirit world at any time, of her own will and with a drop of her own blood? Of no more use to you? I don’t believe that, and neither do you.”

“She accomplished what I commanded her to do. She cut a gate through the spirit fence the creatures of this part of your world have erected to stop my Hunt from entering these lands. Now I have even more fields in which to hunt.”

“Let us say that is true. If you truly had no more use for her, you would have no reason to take me. I heard you tell her I was the leash you would use to keep her tied to you. So you do wish to keep her bound to you. If you’d stop pretending otherwise, we might manage a productive conversation.”

“I find your arrogance intriguing. I can do what I want to you, and you know it. Yet you speak this way to me.”

“I think you cannot kill me. Not until next Hallows’ Night. You might be better asking yourself, how can we be allies?”

My sire laughed. “You are entirely delightful. More arrogant than the male who was with Tara Bell, but just as talkative and defiant. The difference is that he had never touched Tara Bell while you have had sex with my daughter. You realize, of course, I will have a claim on any children you sire on her.”

Blessed Tanit! I hadn’t thought of that!

Judging by Vai’s suddenly pinched expression, he hadn’t either.

We knew the mansa of Four Moons had a claim on any children we might have until we could find a way to release ourselves from clientage. To condemn our children to the chains my sire had already shackled me with was unthinkable. Yet to gauge by the narrowing of his eyes and the tension in his jaw, the idea of never having children was to Vai unendurable.

“Ah, now I have trapped you,” said my sire with a pleased smile. “That wasn’t nearly as difficult as I feared it might be.”

Horribly, as they had in my dream, his body and face melted, flowing into another face and another body. He became a creature who looked exactly like me, with my thick black hair pulled into a braid. I saw Vai’s gaze drawn as by a spell down the length of the braid to the span of her hips. The creature’s lips were slightly parted as if she was thinking of eating or speaking, and I couldn’t be sure which, but either way she looked as if she was inviting a kiss. She was dressed exactly as I had been when in the coach with him, in a faded length of cloth wrapped to make a skirt and in a damp lawn blouse so thin and threadbare where it clung to the curve of her breasts that the shadow of her nipples showed through the cotton. Was that how I had looked when I had stepped down out of the coach on the ballcourt on Hallows’ Night?

Vai inhaled sharply.

Desperately, I tried to open the door, but the numbness in my lips had infested my whole body. All I could do was watch through gremlin eyes.

The creature who looked like me leaned closer to Vai. The neck of her blouse gapped open to reveal no bodice beneath, nothing but bare skin. Vai pressed back against the seat.

Her hands wandered up the front of his dash jacket.

“Sire a child on me,” the creature said in a voice like mine but nothing like mine, because its whisper was cruelly seductive, “and I’ll leave any children you sire on her alone.”

Vai spoke in a hoarse murmur. “You can’t bear children. You’re a man.”

“Do I feel like a man?”

Her lips brushed his. Her knee eased between his thighs and her hands spanned his shoulders to draw him into her kiss. Breasts brushed his chest. Vai became as rigid as if he had turned to ice. I guessed he was angry at himself for being aroused.

I could scarcely blame him. If I hadn’t known I was me, I would have thought I was her.

If I’d had a body and an axe, I would have smashed in my sire’s head.

“No,” Vai said against its lips, his mouth unyielding.

“But you want me,” the Master of the Wild Hunt said in my voice, like a purr of desire.

Her voice, her hands on him, were claws digging into my flesh, yet I could do nothing.

“No.” Vai’s voice was clear and cold. “I want her. There is a difference.”

“What difference would that be?”

“The shape you wear is an illusion.”

“When she comes for you, as you and I both know she is trying to do right now, how will you know if it is she or I who grasps you close and whispers words of hope and love?”

Vai relaxed. My sire did not know the secrets of the djeliw and bards, with their wholly human magic. He did not know about the way our marriage had bound us. He did not know I wore a locket.

“I admit I can tell no difference between you and her,” Vai said, a cunning statement that had the advantage of being truth because words can have two meanings. “But right now I know you are not her. I will not do this.”

My sire sat back into the other seat, melting back into his young male form, a finger tapping his lips as he considered his captive.

Vai ran a hand down the buttons of his dash jacket, straightening and smoothing, an action that apparently calmed him. I had not been so steadfast in withholding my kiss from the opia.

As this uncomfortable thought chased me, I heard the rumble of wind. The coach rocked and swayed as if caught in the tidal currents of the spirit world. As I clung, barely hanging on, I suddenly remembered why the Master of the Wild Hunt used this coach. In the spirit world, the tides of dragons’ dreams altered the landscape and any creatures caught out in it. But the coachman had been made in the mortal world by the cunning artifice of goblins. He, and the coach and four horses that were a part of him, could not be changed. To travel in the coach was to be safe from the altering tidal waves.

“What do you really want?” Vai asked.

“I want what I am required to want. I do the bidding of my masters, just as you no doubt do the bidding of yours.”

“The servants of the night court answer questions with questions, and you do not. I would like to know who or what the Master of the Wild Hunt calls master.”

“Do not doubt my intentions. If she cannot rescue you, you will be the next sacrifice.”

“Not until the next Hallows’ Night,” said Vai in the clipped tone he used when he was particularly wound up. “So I ask again, if you intend to kill me, what chance is there I would ever agree to sire a child on you if it would gain me nothing? If you do kill me, how can I sire a child on your daughter, if a child born to your daughter is what you require? Neither of these things can be accomplished unless you free me, allow me to return to her, and promise me you’ll never hunt me down.”

“A well-argued point. Why would I need you at all? I could sire a child on her myself.”

The words hit like a punch in the chest. Fingers slipping, I almost lost my grip on the latch.

So fast I didn’t see it coming, Vai swung up his sword and stabbed my sire.

He aimed for up under the ribs to the heart, a move he’d no doubt been taught by rote by the mage House’s swordmaster. But the close confines of the coach and my sire’s astonishingly fast reflexes—an arm flung up—deflected the blow. The tip slid into the meat of my sire’s right shoulder.

Pain pierced like steel sliding into my own flesh.

I screamed. A howl rose, shuddering around me and through me: Every creature bound to the Master of the Wild Hunt by blood felt the cut of that blade.

My sire grabbed the blade with his left hand. A clear ichor oozed from his shoulder. The translucent liquid dribbled down the length of the blade. The fingers of my left hand flamed with agony. I was barely holding on with my right, hanging over the abyss.

My sire did not let go of the sword. He raised his right hand to squeeze Vai’s sword arm. Eyes flared with fury, he spoke in a terrifying whisper. “What is done to me, I do to her. That was her cry of agony.”

Vai froze, struck between horror and disbelief. With a single tug, my sire pulled the sword out of his shoulder and shoved the blade against Vai’s throat.

I choked out a wordless cry. The screams and whimpers of the pack echoed me, their pain and my pain churning like so many merging currents until I was almost obliterated. Vai’s hand spasmed on the hilt of the sword as he fought uselessly against the paralysis washing through him.

“It would have gone better for you if you’d stayed amusing. I’d have sheltered you then, at least until next Hallows’ Night. Now you’ve made me angry. I’m throwing you into the pit. No mortal can survive there.”

I struggled to open the latch, but my limbs had no strength. I was as frozen as I had been in my dream. Frost crackled out from the ichor that seeped from my sire’s wounded shoulder, like winter devouring the dying memory of summer. Its lacework beauty ate through the human form my sire had taken. Ice engulfed the interior of the coach, consuming every morsel of space that was not the coach itself. Ice entombed Vai, so cloudy and dense I could see only the line of steel that marked his sword.

Last of all, ice crystals bristled down the length of the latch. With a whimper of fear the outside latch gremlin shut its eyes, leaving me alone in the dark.